In this long-awaited first volume of a planned trilogy, Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez begins to tell the story of his own life. It spans his birth in 1927, the start of his career as a writer, and the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to the woman who would become his wife. As in his fiction, time and memory have—and should have—mutable properties, and a trip to his grandparent's home as a young man can, for scores of pages, overlap with his first childhood visit.

"Its most powerful sections read like one of his mesmerizing novels, transporting the reader to a Latin America haunted by the ghosts of history and shaped by the exigencies of its daunting geography, by its heat and jungles and febrile light. The book provides as memorable a portrait of a young writer's apprenticeship as the one William Styron gave us in Sophie's Choice."—NYTimes